The Good Humor Man Is Still Playing Strong On Peoria
By Lori Roll, Oct 17, 1982 (by permission of Joe Worley, Tulsa World)

Located at one end of what used to be known as "The Strip", the Lewis Meyer Bookstore sits so unobtrusively next to the old Brook Theater that you'd have to hunt for it if you didn't know the place.

It's a small store crammed with thousands of books, from Chinese history, house repairing, karate and astrology to fiction, children's books, adults only books and inspirational books.

Low stools invite bookworms to browse. A few chosen customers have cellophane rights, the authorization from Meyer to slit open a newly shelved volume.

An old black upright typewriter from which Meyer issues his monthly customer newsletter shares the check-out counter with a chocolate chip cookie and three of Meyer's seven published books.

Lewis Meyer - always on hand - greets customers with compliments, advice, opinions and hints on good books.

"Why, hello dear," he croons to a familiar customer. "You look good, darned good, younger than ever. Say, here's a new novel I think you'd like. Outrage. I bought a hundred copies of it."

He approaches another customer. "Have you seen Buscaglia's new book? He is so WONDERFUL! He LOVES, he SWEATS, he, he..."

"Did she buy Outrage"?" he whispers to his wife Natasha as the first customer leaves.

"I like to sell the right book to the right person," Meyer explains. "That's how I get my kicks."

Raw enthusiasm, a positive outlook, brutal frankness, sensitivity. All are descriptions aptly applied to Lewis Meyer, depending on your point of view. He is many things to many people.

Meyer's philosophies are simple, and he doesn't mince words when he tosses a few unsolicited remarks at you across the counter. "People tell you 'Everything in moderation.' I don't believe that. I say if you live a moderate life you'll die a moderate death." He pauses for effect, erupts with a throaty giggle.

A whole generation of Tulsans has grown up with "Lewis Meyer's Bookshelf", a half-hour book review on television.

Week after week, Meyer shares enthusiasm for books with an unseen world of followers.

In person, Meyer is a character out of J.R.R. Tolkien's Hobbit stories come to life.

He says he's psychic, "I KNOW certain things. Some people call it intuition, but in my case I'm just plain psychic."

His head nods, and he draws a little closer. "When I was in Dartmouth College, in the summertime one year I read palms at the Hearthstone Restaurant in New York City. I loved it. It was hard work but I was very good at it.

"I could tell you things that've happened in this store you wouldn't believe. A classic case happened when this gal walked in one night and said, 'Read my hand. I hear you're very good at it.' And I said, 'No, I don't want to read your hand. I don't want to.' I just got this feeling. Her neck was dirty. I don't know She kept bugging me.

"Finally I said, 'Look, I'll read you and I don't need to look at your hand. You are having a love affair with your boss who is very much married, and if you do not stop that tonight, this minute, right this minute, something awful is going to happen!' And I never tell people things like that. I tell the positive things. Well, two days later this woman called just frantic. Her boss had died in her bed in her apartment."

He explodes in a giggle, then settles back in his chair and soberly continues, "My psychic powers are a gift. I try to use them to help people, not for my own gain."

A graduate of Dartmouth College and the University of Michigan law school, Meyer practiced law in Creek County for five years before he turned to books. "I didn't fit in," he says. "I can't stand to see injustice done and most lawyers get away with it. I just don't have the soul for it. I have been so happy since the day I walked out of that office and started doing what I liked.

"I've always wanted a bookstore. When I quit law I went to work in the book department of Brown Dunkin for free. Then I began doing book reviews and lectures for them. I worked there for 16 or 17 years doing book reviews on KVOO and touring the whole country. Sometimes I went to 24 cities a month. I've known all the publishers in New York for years.

"Then I bought an hour a day on KTUL and KOME doing book reviews, and I would sell these to sponsors. It was very profitable. In the meantime I bought this building and opened my bookstore. After I married Natasha I started writing books."

Meyer's book, including a book of children's stories and a spoof on sex manuals, are successes.

Preposterous Papa, now published in five languages and a best seller in West Germany, and Off the Sauce have sold over a million copies apiece.

Preposterous Papa, (and its mate, Mostly Mama), about his unusual parents and well-to-do upbringing on their ranch in Sapulpa, Oklahoma, gives insight not only into the larger-than-life man Meyer describes as a "king, general, conquering hero, vote getter, supersalesman, father confessor, and trumpeter of the morn," it also offers clues about Meyer himself.

Meyer is not a tornado like his father. He is a small cyclone.

Customers come in emptyhanded and leave with bundles of books. Telephone orders come in to be filled, inventory is taken and replenished, fortunes are told to willing and sometimes unsuspecting customers, weekly radio shows are prepared and taped, newsletters mailed, books read.

Off the Sauce, his other best-seller, tells another side of Meyer in a tragic, but hilarious account which typifies Meyer's philosophy of life.

"With the booze I had to either stop drinking or drink myself to death," he says of his bout with alcoholism. An avid member of Alcoholics Anonymous, Meyer says "For 34 years at AA I've sponsored literally hundreds of people. Sometimes in the bookstore they're shaking in all corners, you know. It's such a joy to help."

Always, Meyer is an unfailing optimist.

"I think everything is going to be all right. I live one day at a time."

He pauses. "One reason I wrote seven books is that Natasha told me any time I sold a book, she'd give me a week at any horse track in America. I'm crazy about horse racing," he giggles.

Meyer hasn't written a book in five years. "It's too much hassle. You can't just write it, you have to get out and beat the bushes to sell it."

Besides, he has gotten what he wants -- a bookstore which The New York Times described as "the best bookstore in the South."

"There are more failures in the book business than even in restaurants or any other business in America," says Meyer. "Your inventory has to be so large. A bookstore should be a very live place. We're such a happy operation."

"I don't even consider those sterile little chain bookstores real bookstores. They're pretty, but they don't have books on skin diving, tatting, weaving, you name it.

"I always have my nose in a book because it just takes that to keep up. I think people who spend time with their noses in books are the happiest people.

"Because books never let you down."

Copyright © 2000, World Publishing Co. All rights reserved